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Emile de Antonio, Chris Marker, Johan Grimonprez and the ‘Anarchival’ Documentary as Guerrilla Media
Dr Michael N. Goddard
15.00, 21 March 2018, Cinema, School of Film & Television, Falmouth University
Based on research for his recently published book, Guerrilla Networks (AUP January 2018), Dr Goddard's talk will present the idea of the ‘anarchival’ documentary looking especially at works of filmmakers Emile de Antonio, Chris Marker and Johan Grimonprez. Taking inspiration from media archaeological concepts of ‘anarchaeology’ (Zielinski) and the ‘Anarchive’ (Ernst), this talk will examine how radical filmmakers engage with a heterogeneous range of archival materials to produce counter histories, challenging both dominant political discourses and conventional media practices. Dr Goddard argues that their practices go well beyond concepts of the ‘archive film’, or the essay film, to constitute radical interventions into material archives and cultural memory using the heterogeneous resources of the former against hegemonic certainties of the latter. Whether in de Antonio’s series of films interrogating the media archives around the Kennedy Assassination, the Vietnam War and the media appearances of Richard Nixon, or Marker's Le Fond de l’air est rouge (1977, A Grin Without a Cat) that critically reviews archival traces of radical movements from 1968 to their decline in the mid-1970s as a tragic history of defeats that nevertheless maintain an affective charge in the present, this talk will position these projects as exemplary anarchival films that have much to contribute to contemporary screen practices. A more contemporary continuation of this anarchival approach will also be considered through a close reading of Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997).
Dr Michael N. Goddard is Reader in Film, Television and Moving Image in the School of Media, Arts and Design at the University of Westminster. He has published widely on Polish and international cinema and audiovisual culture as well as on cultural and media theory. Dr Goddard's recently published, Impossible Cartographies, focuses on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz. He has also been conducting research on the fringes of popular music, focusing on groups including The Fall, Throbbing Gristle and Laibach, which culminated in two book collections on noise, Reverberations and Resonances. Dr Goddard's latest book on urban guerrilla movements and radical media practices in the 1970s, Guerrilla Networks, was published in January 2018 by Amsterdam University Press in its Recursions series. Dr Goddard is currently working on a book on the British post-industrial group Coil, and a new research project on genealogies of immersive media and virtuality.
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